Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta. Vol. 5 (in 2 parts): Euripides (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta. Vol. 5 (in 2 parts): Euripides E. Christian Kopff Richard Kannicht . Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta. Vol. 5 (in 2 parts): Euripides. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2004. Pp. 1164. €368.00. ISBN 3-525-25755-4. Richard Kannicht's edition of the testimonia and fragments of Euripides brings to a triumphant conclusion one of the major scholarly enterprises of the past generation. Actually there is a span of more than a generation between the first edition of TrGF 1 (1971) and TrGF 5 (2004). Kannicht began work after publishing TrGF 2 on the tragic adespota in 1981. The time was well spent. TrGF 5 is indispensable for a research library in classical studies. Kannicht's edition is the gold standard for students of Euripides' fragments. They will be advised to begin, however, with Euripides: Selected Fragmentary Plays I (Warminster 1995) and II (Warminster 2004), edited by Christopher Collard and M. J. Cropp, with K. H. Lee for I and John Gibert for II. For French readers François Jouan and Herman Van Looy have edited a Budé text of the fragments in four volumes (Paris 1998–2003). These works introduce novices to, and instruct experts in, the sources and scholarly problems and offer sound texts and reliable translations. Kannicht's work is aimed at scholars who want access to the complete textual evidence for the fragments (some papyrus evidence is very lacunose) and all the conjectures and scholarly work done on them. After working through the better-preserved plays in the English or French editions, novices will be ready to take advantage of Kannicht's vast erudition and thorough citation of the evidence. They can then go on to deal with less well preserved plays. An adequate interpretation of much extant Greek drama requires knowledge of lost plays. Members of the original audience of Sophocles' Philoctetes will have seen or read Euripides' version. Sophocles, at any rate, did, and his play is in part a response to Euripides, as Euripides' Antigone seems to reflect Sophocles'. Euripides fascinated Aristophanes, and careful readers and interpreters need to be aware of the role of Telephus in Acharnians and [End Page 162] Bellerophon in Peace (and Sophocles' Tereus in Birds). Reading Andromache gave Dionysus in Frogs the idea of fetching Euripides from Hades (even if he gets distracted before the play's end). The evidence for these plays has never been more thoroughly reported than by Kannicht. Kannicht cites the information needed to keep alive scholarly problems old and new. Aristotle and Plutarch agreed that the most exciting scene in Greek tragedy occurred in Cresphontes, where Queen Merope almost kills her own son Cresphontes with an axe when he returned home in disguise after many years with a story that he had killed him (i.e., Cresphontes). An old family retainer restrains her at the last moment. The staging of the scene has provoked lively scholarly debate. Kannicht gives references stretching back to a classic article by Nicholas Wecklein in 1880. P.Oxy. 3317 gives us iambic verses that overlap with a quotation which Stobaeus ascribes to Euripides' Antigone (fr. 175). In 1980 Wolfgang Luppe suggested that the ascription was a mistake for Antiope, and James Diggle printed the lines among the fragments of Antiope in his OCT Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta Selecta (Oxford 1998) 87. Oliver Taplin and Christopher Collard joined Diggle in favor of Luppe's conjecture, while Ruth Scodel, Christian Zimmermann, and Kannicht reject the new attribution. The list of sigla, abbreviations, and references to commonly cited books and rare editions occupy twenty-six pages. Bibliography restricted to one play is mentioned ad loc. At Cresphontes fr. 456 (492), Merope's attempted murder, "Chourmouziades 105f." is cited, a reference explained in the apparatus to Andromeda fr. 124 (246). The reference may be hard to find in library catalogues, since the book's title page reads Nicolaus C. Hourmouziades, Production and Imagination inEuripides (Athens 1965). The name is spelled Chourmouziades (also at Sthenboea, 648) because in the list of abbreviations (17) Kannicht transliterates the name from the title page of his book on satyr plays in Modern Greek. Hourmouziades' discussions of eccyclema and machine in Greek drama are important...